Eric G. Wilson is the Thomas H. Pritchard Professor of English at Wake Forest University, where he teaches Romanticism as well as courses on film, technology, and melancholy. Wilson has recently turned his academic training into a trade title, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). The book, which appeared on the bestseller lists of the L.A. Times and the Calgary Herald, was featured in many national and international media venues, including NBC's Today Show, NPR's All Things Considered, Newsweek, and the L.A. Times. Previously, Wilson published on subjects ranging from the ecology of ice to androids to David Lynch to the Gnostic aspects of contemporary film. These books, along with numerous articles on cinematic and literary subjects, have garnered him several awards, including a fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Wilson is currently completing a piece of literary nonfiction, a memoir called The Mercy of Eternity: A Memoir of Depression and Grace, due from Northwestern University Press in the fall of 2010. 
“If we take Grant seriously, we must contend with an extreme difficulty: what appears to be fake, an actor portraying a character, might be real; what we normally think of as real, a person gesturing in the everyday world, might well be artificial.”
